Is Child Work Detrimental to the Educational Achievement of Children? Results from Young Lives in Ethiopia

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This paper explores the effect of work on children's school achievement as measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Identifying the causal effects ofchild work on education is made difficult because the choice of work and/or school is made simultaneously and may be determined by the same potentially unobserved factors.Therefore, both ordinary least square and instrumental variable estimation methods were used to identify the effect of work on school achievement. We used dummy variables for drought, crop failure and pests and diseases, for increases inthe prices of food, and for urban locality as instruments which are highly, though not directly, correlated with achievementin education. Theresults obtained showed that children's work had a negative effect on achievementin education as measured by the raw PPVT score. Therefore, it is important to design mechanisms that enable households to withstand income shocks without resorting tochild work. The Government ofEthiopia should consider implementing a programme that provides financial incentives to households to send their children to school regularly, thus potentially increasing thechildren’s future earning capacity. A conditional cash transfer programme could be a way of helping children achieve better in school and of minimising child work.